The CCP hates America because we helped create modern China

OPINION:

The prevailing narrative portrays the United States and China as inevitable rivals locked in a struggle for global supremacy, but history tells a different story.

For most of the past two centuries, no foreign nation contributed more to China’s modernization than the United States. Unlike the European colonial empires or Imperial Japan, America never sought to partition China, seize its territory or reduce it to a colony. Instead, America shaped modern China through education, science, medicine, commerce, diplomacy and the example of constitutional government.

Ironically, those very contributions explain why today’s Chinese Communist Party regards the United States not merely as a geopolitical rival but as its greatest ideological enemy.

America’s favorable disposition toward China has deep roots. During the 18th-century Enlightenment, thinkers such as Voltaire admired China’s meritocratic bureaucracy and sophisticated civilization.

That admiration crossed the Atlantic and influenced educated Americans. Born of its own anti-colonial revolution, the United States generally viewed China not as a land to conquer but as an ancient civilization worthy of respect and friendship.

This spirit distinguished American policy from that of the European empires. While Britain built its China trade on opium, culminating in the Opium Wars, the U.S. never sponsored a narcotics trade against China.

American merchants traded in China, but Washington neither sought colonies nor demanded concessions comparable to those Britain obtained in Hong Kong, Germany in Qingdao, Russia in Port Arthur or Japan in Taiwan.

No figure better embodied this tradition than Anson Burlingame. Appointed by President Lincoln as U.S. minister to China in 1861, Burlingame insisted that China be treated as a sovereign equal rather than an object of imperial exploitation.

After leaving American service, he accepted the Qing government’s invitation to become China’s chief envoy to the Western powers — the first American ever to represent another nation at the highest diplomatic level.

His efforts produced the Burlingame Treaty of 1868, one of the most generous agreements any Western nation concluded with Qing China. It affirmed China’s sovereignty, rejected colonial coercion and encouraged free migration between the two countries.

While Europe carved China into spheres of influence, America welcomed Chinese immigrants. That generosity to Chinese immigrants later provoked a domestic backlash, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

The Chinese Exclusion Act remains a regrettable chapter in American history, but the larger truth endures: Before exclusion came inclusion, and before suspicion came friendship.

The same spirit informed Secretary of State John Hay’s Open Door Policy of 1900. As Europe and Japan contemplated partitioning China in the aftermath of the xenophobic Boxer Rebellion, Hay insisted that China remain territorially intact and commercially open to all.

That policy helped preserve China’s political unity and prevented the wholesale colonial partition that much of Africa suffered. America’s greatest contribution, however, was intellectual.

During the late Qing and Republican eras, American missionaries, educators and philanthropists established many of China’s finest universities, hospitals and research institutions, including Yenching University, St. John’s University, Lingnan University, West China Union University and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Peking Union Medical College.

Returning much of its Boxer Indemnity to fund scholarships, the U.S. educated generations of Chinese scientists, physicians, engineers, educators and public leaders. Modern Chinese higher education, medicine, science and engineering all bear unmistakable American fingerprints.

America also transformed Chinese political thought. Constitutional government, separation of powers, judicial independence, representative institutions, individual liberty and the rule of law profoundly influenced late Qing reformers and Republican revolutionaries.

Sun Yat-sen openly admired American constitutionalism, and the Republic of China reflected many of those principles.

Then came the great historical rupture.

In 1921, Vladimir Lenin dispatched Bolshevik agents to Shanghai to establish the Chinese Communist Party. Since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, the CCP has sought to erase American influence while regarding the United States as its principal existential enemy.

Ironically, nearly half a century of America’s misguided engagement after 1979 — through trade, technology, investment, educational exchange and support for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization — enriched and empowered a regime fundamentally hostile to the United States, producing what former President Richard Nixon, toward the end of his life, called a Frankenstein of our own making.

Why? Because the CCP does not fundamentally fear American military or economic power. It fears American ideals.

Marxism-Leninism rests on one-party dictatorship, ideological monopoly and the subordination of individual liberty to party authority.

American constitutional democracy rests on the opposite principles: Government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, rights precede the state, truth emerges through free inquiry and political power is constrained by law.

The CCP understands something many Americans have forgotten: These principles possess extraordinary appeal. Democracy, free speech, religious liberty, academic freedom, constitutional government and the rule of law speak to universal human aspirations.

That is why Beijing treats American influence not as ordinary cultural competition but as ideological contamination. Google, YouTube, X, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Wikipedia, foreign media, universities and nongovernmental organizations are censored not because American ideas are weak, but because they are powerful.

The CCP portrays U.S.-China tensions as an inevitable clash between civilizations. History proves otherwise. Long before the CCP existed, Americans admired Chinese civilization, defended China’s sovereignty, educated Chinese students, built Chinese universities, trained Chinese physicians, welcomed Chinese immigrants and opened American markets to Chinese commerce. None of these actions reflected hostility toward the Chinese people.

The source of today’s confrontation is therefore not an inherent conflict between America and China. It is the irreconcilable contradiction between constitutional democracy and Marxist-Leninist dictatorship.

The CCP fears not America itself, but the ideals it represents — ideals capable of inspiring the very people the party seeks to control.

That is the deepest irony of U.S.-China relations. No foreign nation contributed more to China’s modernization than the United States, yet none is regarded by the CCP as a greater threat.

America’s greatest export to China was never machinery, capital or technology. It was the revolutionary idea that governments exist to serve the people rather than rule them, that truth is discovered through freedom rather than dictated by ideology and that every individual possesses rights no party can rightfully extinguish.

To put it another way, the tragedy of modern U.S.-China relations is that the nation that once sent Anson Burlingame to defend China’s sovereignty now confronts a regime that fears precisely what Burlingame represented.

That is not American power. It is the American idea that free societies flourish through openness, liberty, equality and the consent of the governed, while dictatorships survive only through coercion, censorship and fear.

• Miles Yu is the director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute. His “Red Horizon” column appears every other Tuesday in The Washington Times. He can be reached at [email protected].